Tag: BARACKOBAMA

The White House just released its National HIV/AIDS strategy yesterday, and it ambitiously aims to reduce new HIV infections by 25-percent by 2015. How will it accomplish this goal? The plan outlines the use of more social networking, but not much new funding. According to the new policy, "The United States currently provides more than $19 billion in annual funding for domestic HIV prevention, ...

Can Lady Gaga be stopped? Self-marketing genius, living performance piece, fortuitous flavor of the month or some combination of the three, the Lady's rise to fame seems uninhibited by even bad press and a mediocre music video. You could argue that the world has reached its Lady Gaga tipping point, but the numbers would refute you. As we reported back in April, Gaga made YouTube history by ...

Since President Obama's campaign for the Oval Office began back in 2007, we've known that politicians have been made aware of this whole Internet thing, and have found that it can be a useful tool for spreading their truths, half-truths and lies. We've written recently about Obama's new iPhone app, and even how the septuagenarian Senator Ike Skelton has taken to the "Twitters" (Obama's coinage) in ...

The Obama administration is making a major push to improve the state of broadband in the U.S., and to make large swaths of the wireless spectrum available for mobile data services. A full 500 Mhz of spectrum (nearly double what is available now) is expected to be freed up over the next ten years and be auctioned off primarily to broadband companies. The effort should create jobs, in both ...

The Obama '08 campaign helped to pioneer the use of mobile applications in political campaigns. Now, the remnants of that grassroots group, Organizing for America (OFA), is releasing a new iPhone and iPad app that will connect voters with Democratic representatives and candidates -- just in time for the fall elections. The official OFA app has all the features you'd expect from a political ...

The Obama administration just keeps flexing its new media muscle and redefining what it means to speak to the people in a way that we haven't seen since the days of FDR's "fireside chats." The White House blog, its slick interactive website, weekly YouTube addresses and Twitter account are powerful, but they still feel like the tools of politics. A new White House video blog though, called 'West ...

One year ago this Friday will mark the one year anniversary of Data.gov, the Fed's repository for public databases and information that is the centerpiece of Obama's push for open government. When the site launched on May 21, 2009, it was home to 47 sets of data, and in the ensuing 365 days that followed, that number ballooned to more than 250,000. But one criticism that has persistently followed ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales recently turned snitch on his former Wiki-compatriots, but he probably won't make too many enemies for doing so (outside of the Wikimedia Commons circles, at least). Wales reportedly alerted federal authorities to the presence of child pornography under two separate Commons categories, saying "I ...

As we've said before, regardless of your political affiliation, it's hard to argue with the fact that the Obama administration has helped to usher in the Government 2.0 era. It's not just the feds, though. Local and state governments are taking tentative steps towards digital transparency too, offering scads of raw data and information via revamped websites. According to a recent survey from the ...

Share Remember that whole "birther" movement that sprung up during the 2008 campaign and somehow managed to hang around even after an outpouring of facts confirmed that President Obama was actually born in the U.S.? Yeah, we'd forgotten about it, too. One U.S. Army doctor, though, hasn't let it go, and now finds himself in hot water because of it. Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin refused to show up ...

People from a particular "party" (that might look something like this) are constantly making demands that the federal government cut taxes and reign in the deficit. Hell, most all of us can agree that we need to get our ballooning public debt under control before China turns us all into indentured servants. But nobody is willing to give up their precious government and social programs like ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... Our favorite avant-garde entrepreneur/pop star just got a little more famous. Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance' music video just took the number one spot for most viewed on YouTube -- which is kind of surprising. Considering the bated breath with which the world waited for 'Telephone,' you'd think her Tarantino/'Thelma and Louise' homage ...

The Climate Group, a group of tech companies including Google, AT&T, Intel, GE, HP and Verizon, has written a letter (.PDF) to President Obama urging him to explicitly support the building of a smart grid and the deployment of smart metering technologies to every home and business in the U.S. The use of smart grid technologies is believed to be an essential ingredient in creating more ...

Among the many controversial policies enacted under the George W. Bush administration, perhaps the most legally nebulous was the National Security Agency's wiretapping program, which authorized federal agents to monitor Americans' phone calls and e-mails in the name of national security. When it was revealed that federal officials had been monitoring the phone calls of the now defunct Islamic ...

Perhaps no other person in the world is kept under closer security than President Obama. His Twitter account, on the other hand... not so much. A small gap in Presidential security was publicly exposed Wednesday, as French police, in coordination with the FBI, arrested a man who'd successfully hacked his way into Obama's Twitter. The (not surprisingly) unemployed 25-year old Frenchman, who ...